Automatic analyzers automatically perform quantitative and qualitative analysis on biological samples such as blood and urine. Those automatic analyzers are prevailing mainly in large hospitals and clinical inspection centers, where a large number of patients' specimens are required to be processed within limited time. According to the throughputs, long, medium and small-sized automatic analyzers are being developed. In a large automatic analyzer that performs a process of analyzing a large number of specimens per unit of time, specimen vessels that store specimens are held by a holder, called specimen rack, and the specimen vessels are transported to a plurality of analyzing devices through a transport line (transport device). The automatic analyzer outputs an analysis result automatically only if a laboratory technician loads a rack in a specimen rack loading port.
In this case, the specimen rack loaded in the specimen rack loading port is transported through a belt-conveyor-like transport line, during which a barcode reader installed above the transport line reads and recognizes the type of the rack and a specimen for analysis.
It is requested that automatic analyzers output measurement results as fast as possible in the facilities where a large number of patients' specimens are processed daily.
Meanwhile, in the large automatic analyzer or a specimen pretreatment device that performs a pretreatment such as centrifugal separation on a sample in order to enable the automatic analyzer to analyze the sample, an analysis or treatment could fail for some reason. For example, a dispensing nozzle becomes clogged during dispensing a sample in some cases, or an identification (ID) attached to a rack or a sample vessel is not successfully read in some cases are conceivable as the reasons. Patent Document 1 discloses a specimen pretreatment device for pretreatment such as centrifugal separation on a blood sample, the known specimen pretreatment device extracts, at the time of a failure of the pretreatment, a rack on which the pretreatment has not be completed, and places the rack in a rack extraction port. With this device, the interrupted treatment can be completed by placing the rack from the rack extraction port to a rack supply unit by an operator.